Smartstor NS4600 Raid 5 NAS/Media Server

A great NAS and media center for home and also for home office. I use mine as a backup and file server. It fast and reliable. Energy saving also.

I'm not kidding. First it wiped out all my data. I called Promise support and they said "Oh you only have two drives" you need at least 3 to protect your data. So stupidly I believed them and added a third drive. TEN DAYS to migrate to raid 5, but whatever, I was protected. NOPE. Lost all my data again. Get this, when I called them they said I should have had my data backed up, 6TB of data, where do you back that up?? Isn't that the point of a RAID? Here is what they said, I could have backed up to another RAID. I assume they meant to a different manufacturers product as theirs is a piece of CRAP. Unless you are looking for a product to help you get ridden of sensitive irreplaceable data DO USE THIS PRODUCT. All that said, it is made of cheap plastic with a cheap laptop power supply underneath. I'm kid you not, you turn if over and it is kind of in an opening in the bottom. You were warned if you buy this piece of JUNK and lose your data.On a positive note Amazon stepped up with NO problems and accepted a return on the product. I hope their warehouse doesn't fill up with piles of these pieces of junk after Promise goes out of business from the class action suits.

Out of the box, this NAS is attractive. However, the OS on this box needs work. If you are technically inclined please read on.After I added my 4 1.5TB drives and powered it on. It showed up under Bonjour->Webpages in Safari. I was able to configure it very quickly. Promise got this part right. I was planning to use it as a media and file storage in our home network that is 100% Mac based. So, I enabled AFP for file-sharing and enabled FireFly for iTunes media sharing. I also turned on DLNA for experimentation. So far so good. When I attempted to transfer over 2 TB of content from my FreeNAS server using my MacPro I started seeing problems. I could not transfer more than 20-30 GB without the NS4600 disappearing from the network completely requiring a reboot of NS4600. Promise tech support is very accessible but could not help me, they first blamed it on my OS saying that said they had not qualified their product on Snow Leopard and asked me to try it under Leopard and try using Samba (SMB). So I installed Leopard in a different volume and tried AFP share first. That exhibited the same problem I saw in Snow Leopard. Then I tried SMP on Leopard, that worked but was about 28% slower than AFP (BTW, I have not seen SMB outperform AFP in any of the NAS systems I have tested). SMB worked fine in SnowLeopard as well. At that point, I disabled SMB, enabled AFP, and retried copying files using my Mac Pro running Snow Leopard. This time the copy worked! Something about using SMB once seems to have made my NS4600 happy! So, the AFP implementation in NS-4600 is unreliable and Promise did not have anything to say about it when I asked them for comments.FireFly iTunes server had difficulty streaming my movie files. They should show up as movie files in iTunes on my Mac. But, when I tried playing, only the audio part would play. This is apparently a known bug that will be fixed in a future update.Because of these problems, I retuned my NS4600 back to Amazon and got a Synology DS-409 as a replacement. So far the Synology DS-409 is working well. I would recommend that over the Promise NS-4600 based on my experience.

There are plenty of detailed technical reviews of this device on the internet so I'm just going to focus on my experience with this NAS. I'm not going to benchmark transfer rates or anything like that.This unit needs some additional work and support, particularly more plugins. It should also be noted that the few plugins that are available need to be configurable. You can't change any of the settings in the Bit Torrent or Media Server plugins which is a real pain.The web interface needs work too, it's pretty simple and the media services available via this web interface are very, very limited indeed.Promise is advertising this more of a feature-rich appliance suitable for home or small office. I don't agree, it's barely fine for home use.There are issues that need to be addressed. For example, I added a third 1 TB drive to the two drives I had in the unit and it took almost 21 hours before the drive was integrated and could be used. Windows 7 keeps randomly being unable to connect the drives (Vista did this too). I have five volumes defined. I boot up my PC, and anywhere from 1 to three of the drives are disconnected though the others are connected. Sometimes I boot up and all the drives are connected. They all use the same credentials but when the drives won't mount Windows wants the credentials again.This unit does show some promise, so if Promise fixes the issue with the non-configurable plugins, drive mappings, adds additional plugins, and vamps up the web interface, particularly the media portions it could be a winner. As the unit has been available for several months and no new plugins have been released, I fear plugin support is going to be spotty at best!I would not recommend purchasing this unit at the present time as right now its just an OK NAS with delusions of more. Promise needs to promise to keep improving the the functionality of the NS4600 going forward.

I have the previous model of this unit as well. The other one is working great but the hard drives are maxed out.The 4600 is great because each hard drive can be 2TB (double the previous model). I also like the physical appearance better than the old one (blue LED lights instead of green). It might be a tad more quiet...but overall it works as it should and I have yet to come across a problem.